FEE PLAN IS PDF: PRETTY DARN FAULTY

Let’s begin at the end: Twenty-five cents is still a sum worth fighting for.

Now let’s begin at the beginning: San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders wants to raise $1.1 million next year via a variety of fee increases. Three involve charging more money for copies of public records.

Before you stop reading, consider this: You are the public. Those records are yours, so this fight is ours.

Now, where were we?

Sanders wants City Council approval in June so his staff can collect cash for certain public-records requests that are crucial to watchdog journalism, in the same way that uncomfortable interviews can be. (You’ve got to see the one below.)

Let’s not dwell on one of the proposals: Sanders wants to charge 25 cents per paper copy to standardize a fee that’s currently only 20 cents in some departments. For-profit FedEx Office charges 10 cents, and the El Cajon city clerk charges 4. But it’s still fine, as long as San Diego city workers remember that the law allows them to bill only for direct duplication costs and conceivably staff copying time — and to waive the fee when a request is made in the public interest.

Let’s not even focus on Sanders standardizing a second fee, which would charge people requesting computer services — compiling, extracting and programming electronic data — 70 cents per minute for staff time.

Most troubling to me is this: Sanders wants to collect 25 cents per page for documents that city staffers provide electronically. It’s been a routinely free service and a great alternative to reviewing documents, then requesting copies, in person at City Hall.

“It’s very similar, and the exact same cost as a paper copy because we’re using the same equipment and same amount of time,” city official Mark Leonard said.

Leonard, Leonard, Leonard. You overlooked the fact that PDF copies don’t require paper or ink or even as much time as print copies do. I know. I timed it.

Copying 20 pages took me 32 seconds.

Turning them into a PDF? 18.

Here’s how Terry Francke, general counsel of Californians Aware, a First Amendment advocacy group, put it: “Ask somebody who’s had to stand at a photocopier and make paper copies of 100 pages, and compare that with forwarding a 100-page PDF. There’s no comparison at all.”

San Diego City Clerk Liz Maland voiced her own concerns about a PDF fee at a public meeting last month. She said the cost of invoicing and collecting a fee for a scanned document “could well exceed the cost of the actual service itself.”

Maland added: “It kind of discourages our paperless initiatives” and “will certainly slow down our responsiveness in many instances if we’re having to collect from people prior to giving them information that we could easily give to them.”

She asked the council to consider waiving PDF costs for requests under $5.

The PDF fee would not be unprecedented countywide.

My sampling shows that clerks in Chula Vista, El Cajon, Poway and Vista do not charge to email PDFs, but clerks in Coronado, Oceanside and Escondido do — at 5, 10 and 15 cents per page, respectively. In San Marcos, it depends.

“If you call me up and say, ‘I want a copy of ordinance whatever’ and I have it residing somewhere electronically, I’ll probably just grab it and send it to you at no charge,” San Marcos City Clerk Susie Vasquez said. “If you want a copy of a general plan document that is 5,000 pages long and has not been scanned in, there’s going to be costs incurred.”

Sanders spokesman Darren Pudgil also said that paperless doesn’t always mean easier. He did so after his office sent me a 136-page PDF (for free) that I requested related to the city’s copier contract.

“It still requires labor,” Pudgil said.

Making a broader point, he added, “We can’t say cost recovery applies to every San Diegan unless you’re a member of the media.”

“It’s really not either-or,” I countered. “We are the public. I think that’s how I and other journalists see it. We’re representing everyone in the region whether they read us or not.”

I also told Pudgil: “I don’t think my column will surprise you when I take a position against the Mayor’s Office-city staff position.”

“I’m expecting it,” he said. “I didn’t think this would go over with unanimous support from the media, but keep in mind there are other fees that are involved here, and hopefully the media will scrutinize those other fee increases just as much as this one.”

My reply? “A Machiavellian person would suggest that this was put out there so the media would glom onto this and not look at those other fees.”

Laughing, Pudgil said, “We’re not that Machiavellian.”

I wondered later if we should just flip a coin to settle it. But no, 25 cents is still a sum worth fighting for.